


Raise Hell

by A_Firewatchers_Daughter



Category: Line of Duty
Genre: Backstory, dark themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24813892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Firewatchers_Daughter/pseuds/A_Firewatchers_Daughter
Summary: "You have in mind to keep me quiet and although you can try, better men have hit their knees and bigger men have died." ('Raise Hell', Brandi Carlile).A young Detective Sergeant is murdered while trying to get to the bottom of a crime committed long before she was born. A DI's Bible brings the case to AC-12's door. She knew everything. She knew more about Ted Hastings than Ted Hastings does. Now it's up to AC-12 to do what she never got the chance to do: raise hell.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	1. Orla Shields

The night drew in quickly during these months. Whether it was the darkness of the skies that caused this case to run rampant in his mind, Ted Hastings could not know. A detective sergeant, an Irish police officer here in the city, murdered. Though he had never known her, never even spoken to her, perhaps his Catholicism was just strong enough to grieve for someone of his own creed. Perhaps it was because she was a police officer who had similar beginnings to his own, though thankfully young enough to have avoided service during the Troubles. Or maybe it was that she was young.

These case notes made no sense. There was no apparent reason to kill DS Orla Shields. Not in her personal life, anyway. No disgruntled exes, no family disputes, no links to anything remotely shady. That was how it had landed on his lap; the only lead the Murder Squad found took them to the DI in Vice, Peter Johnstone. A Bible with his name on the inside cover had been found in Orla’s car.

He poked his head out of his office. “Steve! Kate!” he called out. Both lifted their heads. “A moment of your time?”

They got to their feet and came to his office, Kate shutting the door behind them. “Sir?” asked Steve.

“I’d like you two to take another look in Orla’s flat,” he said. “By all accounts she was a smart cookie. Anything she hid would be hidden _well_. When the Murder Squad searched the place, they were not looking for secrets, they were looking for relationships. Secrets are the name of our game, and Orla Shields would have known how to keep a secret.”

“Yes, sir,” Kate said. “What is it in particular we’re looking for?”

“Anything relating to the discovery of Johnstone’s Bible.”

“Johnstone told us that Bible was given to him on the day of his first communion,” Steve said. “The priest gave it to him.”

“Does he remember the name of the priest?” Ted asked sharply. Priests, even now, made him nervous. He remembered how his mother bended to their every whim, how she had handed over money they could not afford to donate…a priest had a way of controlling his flock. Ted knew that better than most.

“No, sir.”

“Fair enough, I don’t remember the priest I had for my first communion either,” he admitted. “Not his name, anyway. What about the church?”

“Lady of Lourdes,” replied Kate. “I know where it is. I don’t think he’s lying about that; he was born and raised in this area. He knows we’d be able to check it, so I don’t see why he would lie.”

“Get someone to contact that church and confirm it anyway,” Ted told her.

Kate looked like she sorely wished to raise an eyebrow at him; he realised only now that he had asked her to do something she was already doing, and he had probably insulted her by insinuating she needed to be told to do it. “Of course, sir,” she finally replied, rather more stiffly than before.

It occurred to him suddenly that Orla’s family were probably in Ireland, but might have held information. “Did Orla have any family?”

“Mother, two sisters,” Steve said. “Father died when she was a teenager. One sister lives in France. The youngest one, though, she’s a junior doctor in Dublin. Her mother is due to arrive tomorrow evening.”

Ted nodded to himself. “What part of Ireland was she from?” he asked. It didn’t seem to pertain to the case itself, but he asked out of interest.

“She went to school in Carlingford.”

“Right on the border,” Ted noted quietly. He didn’t know if that had any relevance at all, except that she would have grown up hearing about the bay, and why such a small village was equipped with such a large Garda station. “Okay, well, have a look around the flat, let me know what you find.”

* * *

Steve Arnott stepped out of the car in front of Orla Shields’ building, vexed by Ted’s treatment of them. “Why is the gaffer suddenly treating us like we’re idiots?” he asked. “Is it because of the connection to the Catholic Church, do you reckon?”

“No idea, mate,” sighed Kate. “That Bible could have been something or nothing, though, so let’s not get too jumpy about it just yet, eh?”

“Try telling Hastings that.”

“Did you hear him when you said Orla was from Carlingford?”

Steve opened the building door. “What he said about it being on the Irish border? Yeah, I caught that.”

“You think he’s hiding something?”

“No,” Steve said as they took to the stairs. He considered the question again and decided that no, he really did not think Hastings was deliberately hiding anything. “I think he just doesn’t want to think too hard about the connections to Ireland, that’s all.”

Both he and Kate pulled on their gloves and he opened the door to Orla’s flat.

He noticed straight away that there was a lack of Catholicism in here; was that only because he had just been talking about it? But it did seem strange that Orla kept a small Irish flag in the pen cup on the small table that held a landline phone and notebook, that she had a painting of Carlingford Bay and a map of ancient Ireland hanging on her walls, but nothing in relation to her faith. Pride in her hometown, her country, her heritage, but not in her religion. He supposed she was of the generation that chose to distance itself from religion.

Steve gently moved the Irish flag; behind it stood a rainbow flag. Well, Catholicism and lesbianism didn’t exactly mix, and who could blame Orla for choosing her love over her religion?

“Steve?!” called out Kate. Steve went to the corner of the sitting room, to the desk. “What’s odd about this desk?”

He frowned. It looked like a normal, albeit old, desk.

Old.

Nothing in this flat was an antique, but this desk certainly was.

“It doesn’t fit,” he said, looking around the room at the modern furniture, polished and bright, and back at this comparably ancient oak desk. “This place looks like an IKEA showroom, except for this desk.” He glanced at Kate and knelt down to examine the panels. “She knew better than to leave whatever she was hiding in the drawers.”

Bingo.

The panel on the right-hand side at the back had a tiny keyhole. “We’re looking for a key, very small, probably very old,” he said. “If she’d had kids I’d have said look in the dollhouse!”

As he said it, he saw Kate look around the room at an ornament of a house. It was obvious even from Steve’s distance that the thing was hollow; Kate had the same idea he’d had and went to look inside it. From its depths, she produced a burned out tealight and a small key. She gave it to him. The door that had been disguised as a panel opened with ease.

Inside was a file box. Puzzled, Steve frowned as he gently pulled it out and opened the lid. It contained files, each with a three by two photo paperclipped to its corner.

He read out the names as he sorted through them. “Geraldine Scanlon…Patrick O’Rourke…Paul Willison…Kellyanne Gallagher…” Steve picked up the next file and, when he saw the photo attached, got to his feet to show Kate. “Edward Hastings.”

Steve opened the file and flicked through it. Orla had a copy of Hastings’ birth certificate, marriage certificate, baptism, communions, confirmations…it seemed like anything Orla could find on Hastings, she kept a copy. “What the bloody hell were you up to, eh, Orla?” sighed Kate.

* * *

“This is a voluntary interview with DI Peter Johnstone,” Ted said when the tape’s deafening buzz stopped. “Present are DSI Hastings and DS Steve Arnott, and DCI Jane Farthingham, DI Johnstone’s representative from the police federation union. I would like to note for the tape that this is a voluntary interview given by DI Johnstone in relation to the death of DS Orla Shields.”

Peter Johnstone, a tall, thin man, seemed more like a child in that chair. It was almost as if he was here to own up to something.

Ted began without any hesitation. “So, DI Johnstone, how did you know DS Shields?”

Johnstone looked him dead in the face. “I didn’t, sir. Not really. I met her twice. The first time was when she was seconded to my unit to assist with a case.”

“And the second?”

“She appeared at my office one evening, about a month ago, said she had something to ask me,” explained Johnstone. “She seemed genuine, so I let her sit down.”

“What was it she wanted to ask you?”

Farthingham butted in. “DI Johnstone has the right to be questioned by an officer at least one rank superior.” Ted almost rolled his eyes.

“It’s fine,” Johnstone said calmly. Farthingham shot him a warning look. “Honestly, it’s fine. I’ve nothing to hide.” He looked at Steve this time. “She wanted to know about my roots. Said she thought she recognised me, that she thought she might have met me before.”

“And had she?” asked Ted.

“Not that I can remember, sir. I was a baby when I left Ireland, and I’ve only been back a handful of times. Orla Shields was much younger than me – she would have been in primary school the last time I was there. I told her that. She asked if I was adopted, but the way she asked it, it was like she already knew the answer.”

“Just for the record, DI Johnstone, _were_ you adopted?” asked Steve.

“I was. I was born in a mother and baby home. My parents adopted me and brought me to England to live with them.”

“So in actual fact, you weren’t born here. You were born in Ireland,” clarified Ted.

“Yes, sir. If people ask where I’m from, I say I’m from here. It’s just easier, that’s all.”

“I understand, son, don’t worry,” he said. “Where in Ireland were you born?”

“Newry, sir.”

Newry. Near the border, too, but on the other side from Carlingford. He found himself softening to Johnstone now. He did appear to be truthful. He seemed to want to help work out what happened to Orla.

Steve flicked through the evidence files. “I draw your attention to item FCY-122,” he said. “Document 2 in your folders.” A photograph of the Bible found in Orla’s car came up onto the screens. “Do you recognise this item, DI Johnstone?”

Johnstone gave a gentle nod of his head. “It’s my Bible. The Bible my local priest gave me when I made my first communion.”

“Can you tell us how your Bible came to be in Orla Shields’ car?” asked Ted.

“I gave it to her,” he said simply. “When she visited, she asked if I could remember any of the priests I knew growing up. I told her the only thing I had was the Bible signed by one of the priests from when I was a kid. Well, I say signed. It’s more of a scrawl. She said the signature of the priest who gave me it would be helpful in whatever it was she was looking into. I told her I couldn’t remember the priest’s name, but she said it was okay and it might still help. She made sure she promised to return my Bible once she was finished with it. I dug it out that night and dropped it off to her the next morning.”

“Did she give you any details as to what it was she was investigating?”

“No, sir, I’m sorry. I did ask but all she told me was that it was important to her.”

Ted nodded solemnly. He believed Johnstone. There was no reason for him to lie; it was just his Bible. There was nothing found there to incriminate him in any way. “Very well,” said Ted. “Thank you for your cooperation, inspector. Interview terminated.”

As Johnstone got to his feet, he said, “For what it’s worth, sir, I think Orla was a good egg. The couple of times we crossed paths, that was the impression I got.”

Ted nodded his head again. “Thank you, DI Johnstone.”

“Sir,” he replied; he and Farthingham left the room. Steve left too, and Ted was suddenly alone. As he walked back to his office, though, he caught Kate and Steve staring at him. The last time they stared at him like that, they thought he was bent; he almost when to confront them, but decided it would do no good.

Orla Shields. Grew up in Carlingford, just on the southern side of the Irish border. Peter Johnstone. Born just north of that same border, but adopted to an English Catholic family. Newry. Hadn’t the mother and baby home in Newry been a laundry? One of those laundries investigated for a whole host of heinous, barbaric crimes? Could that be why Orla took such an interest in Peter Johnstone?

There came a knock to his office door. “Yeah, come in,” he called out. This case was tiring him out already.

In walked Kate and Steve. “Sir,” said Kate. Behind her, Steve carried a small stack of files; Kate kept a single one in her hand. “These are copies of the files we found in Orla Shields’ desk.”

“What’s in them?” asked Ted. Kate and Steve shared a dark glance. “Come on, what is it?”

Rather than just spit it out like a normal bloody person, Steve stepped forwards and passed him the files. “Do you recognise any of these people, sir?”

Ted frowned but looked all the same. Nothing stuck out to him, apart from the Irishness of the names. “No,” he said once he reached the last file. “No, I don’t know any of them. Why?”

“Sir, we found this amongst the files Orla Shields kept in the secret compartment of her desk,” Kate said carefully, her hand outstretched to pass him the file. He returned the first lot to Steve and took it.

Edward Hastings.

Ted leaned back to sit on the very edge of his desk, and he opened the file. He was met with a photograph of his own face. Then his marriage and banns to Roisin. Then his birth and baptism. Then his address as found on the electoral roll. A copy of his mother’s birth certificate, stating she was born in Cavan. It made sense – his grandparents always lived in Cavan. He used to drive down there with his mother. But there was nothing of his police record. Nothing to do with his time in the force at all. Everything was about his personal records.

“Mother of God,” he said, his voice only a breath. “Why was Orla keeping a file on me? Jesus, why would she do that? Did she think _I_ was up to something?”

“We don’t think so. The only connection found between the people in these files was that they were all born in mother and baby homes in either Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland.”

“I wasn’t born in one of those places,” Ted retorted, doing his very best not to snap at his DI. “I was born in Derry. Moved down to Fermanagh when I was a kid.” He flicked back through the file to look at his own birth certificate. He looked at the address, which he had to confess he had never really done before. It was an address in Derry. “See?” he said, turning it to show Kate and Steve. He took at back to study it and realised something was severely off with the document. “Wait. No, wait. This can’t be mine. It doesn’t have my father’s name on it.”

“We checked with the GRONI, sir,” said Kate. “It was changed and reissued after your mother got married, when you were three years of age. This is the original, kept by the register office.”

But Ted did not answer. He had turned the page to his mother’s birth certificate. “This is wrong,” he said. “My mother was born in 1944, not 1948.”

“That’s a copy of her original birth certificate, sir,” said Steve. “We double checked. We checked everything before we brought it to you. It’s a correct and accurate copy, according to the General Register Office of Ireland. Your mother was born in Cavan on the twentieth of May, 1948. I take it you didn’t know this?”

“Too bloody right I didn’t know this, son!” snapped Ted. “You’re tellin’ me my mother was just a wee girl of fifteen when I was born?! And then she _lied_ about it for the next fifty-five years?!” He leaned back and picked up the phone.

Kate looked alarmed.

“What’re you doing, sir?”

“Calling my mother to ask her what in God’s name she’s-”

“Don’t!” Kate and Steve cried together.

That they spoke in unison and without adhering to hierarchy caught Ted off guard. Shocked, he reluctantly replaced the phone to its hook. “Think about it, sir,” Steve said. “Think about how she’ll feel if her son calls without warning to read her the riot act.”

And he did picture it. His wee mother in her chair, in that little house he grew up in, shaking like a leaf. Because of him. Ted could not deny that his first instinct had indeed been to demand an explanation, with raised voices and cursing and accusations, when he knew the answer already. Shame. Trauma. Not any trauma – trauma that sat with her for the entirety of Ted’s life, for he knew nothing good went on behind the doors of those places.

Kate took another step forward. She no longer stood straight towards her superior officer. Instead she reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder. “Are you okay, sir?”

She had asked that question once before and he had lied. This time, though, where was the way out of admitting that he was taking this information badly? “No. No, Kate, I’m not okay.” But still, he ploughed on with his questioning. “What makes you think that I was born in…” he refused to call them mother and baby homes. They were home to nobody. “A laundry. You know what a laundry means in Ireland, I take it?”

“We do, sir,” Steve said. “The address on your birth certificate, sir, it’s a convent now. Before it was shut down, it was a mother and baby home and laundry run by the Catholic Church. As it was shut down after your birth in 1963, it’s reasonable to conclude that you must have been born there.”

He put the folder to one side. “Are there any other bombshells you’d like to drop? Any other part of my life you’d like to inform me was a lie?” Steve and Kate both looked affronted, and even a little hurt. He caught himself. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your fault. Not your fault at all.” To divert the subject away from the personal, he added, “So what in the world was Orla Shields collecting this information for?”

“We don’t know, sir,” admitted Steve. “But best guess at the moment is that she was looking for someone who was born in one of these institutions, or else compiling evidence towards a case against those running them.”

He held their stares for a moment. He could see it in them, that question. _Is he okay?_ He was not, and so shaken was he that he could not pretend to be calm, collected or unemotional about these findings. They pertained to his own birth. To his mother, who he loved to the ends of this Earth. “Okay, well, keep it up. See what you can find. And when her mother lands, bring her in for a chat, see if she knew what Orla was doing.”

“Yes, sir,” they said. They understood themselves to be dismissed, and closed the door at their backs.

Ted straightened himself up only to close the blinds; he only just managed to shut himself in when it bubbled up. When that first ragged breath took hold of his chest. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he muttered to himself. He sat down and slammed his hand against the desk, though not in anger. Some silly notion in his head told him if he hit something, if he could feign fury, he would not cry from the shock.

That notion had never been more wrong.


	2. I curse ye all to Hell

Ted Hastings drank alone, as he so often did these days. Really, he knew he ought not to drink in his office, but he could not face home. It was barely a home at all. Nobody he loved, or who loved him, was there.

Even if he did go home, he knew he would not sleep. How could he sleep? His mind was so loud. Deafening.

Logically, he thought, the news should have changed nothing. His mam was still his mam, after all, and his father was still not around.

But it did change something. Something in him felt wrong, like he was not meant to be. Most of the babies born in those places were adopted. Why wasn’t he? Was there a reason his mother had been allowed to keep him, or was he simply unadoptable? Had all those prospective parents taken a single look at him and known he could never be any good? God knows he saw that look in the mirror at times. His mistakes always seemed to be greater and more serious than the average person’s. Maybe they had been able to see the flaws in him even then.

But his mother had always loved him. For all her blinkered approach to certain things, she did always love him. Ted had never felt like she didn’t adore the very bones of him. He was her boy, always had been and always would be.

So then, why had she never told him the truth? Why had she let him go ignorant? He would rather have heard it from her than from two of his officers when his name was found in a dead woman’s desk.

Why raise him as Catholic? After all the Church had done to her, why remain loyal to it? Ted had his faith, but it was no religion. Not in the way Irish Catholicism had been for his mother’s generation, for plenty of his own generation too. He had beliefs, theories based on the existence of a higher power, but he was no congregant, and had not been since he left Ireland. Christmas mass, maybe. Easter mass perhaps once a decade. But donating to the Church...he was not naive enough to believe the Catholic Church was in need of money from already struggling families. Those laundries had always angered him. Priests who knew not where boundaries lay...he had dealt with a couple in his life.

He believed in a God, but not in the Church. But his mother raised him a Catholic, and so Catholic he was. He didn't choose it. It was just what he was reared to be.

One night played itself over and over in his head. A month before they had left Fermanagh and moved to Belfast, when he was fifteen years of age, he had gone down to Cavan with his mother to visit his grandparents. It had been an unqualified disaster; Ted never did find out what it was all about. “I curse ye all to Hell,” he murmured his mother’s words as they echoed over the decades. Dinner with the local priest had gone very much awry that evening, and he hadn’t understood why.

Now, though, he thought he understood it. His mother’s parents must have sent her to Derry, or at the very least, consented to her being taken. Seeing them with a priest again, inviting him to dinner, she must have felt like she was outnumbered.

The next morning was the very last time Ted had ever seen or heard from his grandparents. His mother took him up to Belfast and all contact with the family had been severed. From that night on, it had been Ted and his mam against the world. Was this the reason why? And if that catastrophe of an evening had been about him, why had nobody ever told him as much?

He wanted to call her. His mother. No riot act – Steve and Kate had been right to stop him, though he would never say it to them – but just to ask her _why_. Why she had never told him. Why she had disowned her parents in a single fight. But he couldn’t. Not yet. He could not bear the thought of what the answers might be.

Knock. Knock-knock. Knock.

“Come in!” he called, for he knew that, at after ten at night, it was going to be one of two people. And sure enough, it was Kate Fleming who walked in.

“Sir,” she said.

“Hey, Kate,” he sighed. “How are ya?”

She did not answer immediately; she did seem quite unnerved. “Sir, Orla’s mother got herself on an earlier flight. She’s due to land in about half an hour.”

Ted looked down at his watch. It was going to be close to eleven before the woman landed. “Has Steve gone home?”

“Yes, sir.”

He got to his feet and stood still for just a moment to allow the room to cease its spinning. “Come on,” he said as he pulled his coat on and picked up his hat. “We’ll give her a lift to her hotel.”

“Are you sure that’s wise, sir?” Kate asked, her tone painfully careful. “You’ve been drinking.”

Ted smiled slightly, aware that this was Kate’s own way of watching his back. “Never said I would drive.” Kate, still cautious, gave him a single gentle huff of a laugh, but did not look convinced. He dropped his hands by his sides. “I won’t misbehave, I swear.”

Kate rolled her eyes and, truthfully, he could not blame her. “Come on, then.”

In the car, Ted found the silence a little awkward; it was rare for him to allow anyone to see the way he felt about himself, but with this, hiding it was near impossible. It was too enormous. To try and hide it would be like draping a tea towel over an elephant and saying it wasn’t there – if nothing else, he would look like an idiot. He knew Kate didn’t want to bring the subject up, but she would if she saw it upset him too much.

“This case might not be within our remit,” said Ted.

“We need to be sure, though, don’t we, before we hand it back to the Murder Squad?”

“Yeah,” he replied vaguely. He would love nothing more than to bounce it back at them. It had already upset his life enough, and he could not get rid of the feeling that it was not going to stop here. “Have you seen the Johnstone interview yet?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He seemed genuine to me.”

“I thought the same,” he admitted.

“I think she was killed over what she was investigating. The mother and baby homes.”

“Who else knew?”

“We’re not sure, sir. The files were well hidden though, so I don’t think it could have been common knowledge that she was looking into it.”

“The other files – were any of them police officers?

Kate glanced at him for a fraction of a second. “Only you and Johnstone, sir.”

Ted fell silent again. He wondered if anyone in the force had close enough ties to the Catholic Church, or was enough of a religious fanatic, that they would kill to stop Orla’s investigations. He didn’t like the thought at all. Not because he was a Catholic himself, but because he didn’t want to believe another police officer would kill Orla in order to keep an organisation’s secrets. An organisation that just about everyone knew had committed these crimes, whether those involved admitted it or not.

It was a tricky thing to be, Ted often found. A Catholic police officer. An Irish Catholic police officer. It had almost got him killed before, but now there was the awareness that clergy and religious orders had been able to behave in the knowledge that they were above the law. The lack of prosecution of crimes that were open secrets told its own story. He never wanted to be presumed to be on their side. Their crimes were heinous. They took human rights and crushed them. Women and children in particular suffered. His own mother. Probably countless others he knew, as well.

“Promise me something, Kate,” he found himself quietly saying as she parked the car at the airport.

“Sir?”

“If you see me lose my objectivity, tell me. Don’t be one of those officers who say nothing until their superiors go off the rails. Tell me before I get out of hand.”

“Do you plan on getting out of hand?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he said. “I just…I don’t know. I’ve got a bad feeling about it all.”

Kate’s concern was all too obvious in her face, but Ted knew he must swallow his pride on this matter. If this job had taught him anything, it was that many of the men and women he had investigated had got to that point because they had failed to ask for help when they should have done. Because they had not confided in colleagues who might have been able to change their path.

This was a precautionary measure, as much to keep Kate and Steve out of trouble as himself.

“Sir,” Kate began, but she hesitated. It wasn’t like her. “Sir, are you gonna be alright on this case?”

Ted considered her for a moment. “Don’t you trust me?”

“I just don’t want to see you hurt. Steve doesn’t, either.”

“That ship sailed this afternoon, Kate.” He was compelled to be honest with her, so mindful was he of his own isolation. “Ah, I’ll get over myself,” he said. Kate came to walk at his side. Play it down, always. That way, nobody could make it worse. It wasn’t a lie, anyway; he was going to have to get over himself. What use was he if he did not?

In the arrivals hall, they sat down. “You really had no idea about any of it, did you, sir?”

“No,” he said with a scowl. “Nobody thought to inform me, no.”

“Weren’t there any signs? Anything you thought was weird?”

Ted gazed at the flight information screen. There was, of course, and it had played on his mind since he had been faced with the evidence. That night. Drunk, his mother had risen from the dinner table and stumbled down the road to her parents’ church. All four of them – Ted, his grandparents, and the priest – had followed her there.

“She made a holy show of herself,” Ted said. Kate looked questioningly around at him. “About forty years ago, my mother decided we were moving to Belfast. Not long before, we’d gone down to visit my grandparents. Mammy got drunk.” Ted could not help but notice the softening of his DI’s face when he talked of his mother like a son, but he ploughed on despite the embarrassment. “My grandparents had invited the priest to dinner; she got up and said to the three of them, ‘I curse ye all to Hell, that is what you’ve done to me.’ Never saw them again after that.”

The expression Kate wore was not pitying, but still Ted was wary of it. It was like she was beginning to find the cracks in the armour. Cracks Ted had ignored long enough to convince himself were no longer there. Were they just wide enough that Kate could glimpse what lay behind them? The idea frightened him half to death.

Kate cleared her throat. “It does sound like she was extremely angry with her parents, but if it was about all this, why leave it until you were a teenager? And why that priest? She must have known loads of them in her life. Why curse that one priest to Hell?”

The question had occurred to Ted, too. Something about that priest that night had riled his mother. What about him had induced her to get into that state? It could just have been that he reminded her of being taken away because he was cosy with her parents, but then why curse him to Hell? It did seem a radical reaction, especially by her standards. The woman wasn’t a massive drinker. Certainly not a binger. What made her feel like she had to keep drinking?

The conversation was cut short by the passengers from the Dublin flight entering the hall. Ted got up and held a sign that read _Rosaleen Shields_.

A tall woman in her fifties, whose dark but greying hair reached her shoulders, approached them and held out a hand to shake. “Rosaleen,” she said to them as they accepted.

“I’m Superintendent Edward Hastings,” he said, “and this is Detective Inspector Kate Fleming. My condolences for your loss, Mrs. Shields.”

She winced. “Please, call me Rosaleen. I can’t bear stuffiness,” she said. Ted noted the thick Monaghan accent. It startled him for a moment, for it was one he had not heard in decades. “And thank you. I hope my daughter was as much a source of pride to the police force as she is to her family.”

They headed for the exit. “Where are you staying?” Kate asked.

“The James Hotel,” she said.

“I know it,” Kate assured her.

Ted watched Rosaleen; his first impression was that she was robust but kind. “I’m sorry to approach the subject just now, Rosaleen, but is there any reason you can think of that Orla might have been murdered?”

Rosaleen turned her head to speak to him. “Orla had a way of digging where other people wished she could feck off and leave it alone,” she said candidly. “I daresay it made her a good detective.”

“It did,” said Ted. “Everyone she worked with tells us she was not only a capable detective, but had the empathy to deal with victims too. That’s something not all officers are particularly good at.”

Outside the airport, Rosaleen stopped walking and pulled out a cigarette packet. “Do you mind?” she asked, almost apologetic.

“Of course,” Kate said. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” She lit a cigarette and took a draw. “Orla had this thing about the laundries. You know what the laundries were?” she asked, the question directed at Kate rather than Ted.

“Yes. We found some files she was keeping on people she encountered who were born in laundries,” Kate said; she exchanged the most fleeting of dark looks with Ted. “Do you know why she would do that?”

Rosaleen fell back to lean on the wall. “She knew women who were put in those places. She knew people who were born in them, too. Do you remember the mass grave at Drumcondra?”

“Yes,” said Ted.

“Orla was ten when it all came out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her angrier than she was watching that documentary. I let her watch it because I knew it was important that she learn the ugly side of organised religion, but I never thought she would take it as seriously as she did. It so happened that our neighbour was one of the girls kept in a laundry – Orla helped her put her story out there. She was fourteen, and she managed to get the papers to listen to her. Later, when she was about seventeen, she found out about people she knew who were born in the laundries. That was when she started trying to find out more.”

“Some of the people she kept information on had no idea she was doing so,” Kate remarked. “Some of them had never even met her.”

“I can’t account for that, I’m afraid,” Rosaleen said. “All I know is that if Orla was digging, she was doing it because she believed it was the right thing to do.”

Ted had thought as much, though it didn’t get them any further forward. “Did Orla know anyone who works in or has access to the documents held by the general register offices, either side of the Irish border?”

Rosaleen didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, as if she was weighing up whether her answer was worth divulging. “I don’t want to get him into any trouble,” she said cautiously, “but my husband’s brother works in the search room in Dublin.”

“I see,” Ted said. Well, that explained how Orla Shields had his original birth certificate.

“Will he be in bother?”

Kate answered before Ted could; he knew she did not trust him not to give an unhelpful answer. “We’ll have a word with him, but he’s not the focus of our investigation.”

Rosaleen nodded. “As for the Northern Irish offices, I don’t know, I’m sorry. It’s possible she went there and searched for herself, but Christ only knows where she’d have found the time.”

As Rosaleen stubbed out and binned her cigarette, Ted took her case and said, “You’ll be needing your bed, won’t ya?”

“I am _wrecked_.”

“Me too,” Ted muttered when Rosaleen and Kate were up ahead of him. “Me too.”


End file.
